I pretty read this small and perfectly formed novel in one sitting. It disabuses you of the romance of opening a bookshop in a small town by the sea - there is a remarkably little about books in it, and a lot about small-mindedness, annoying neighbours and the difficulties of being an outsider. Recommended. ( )

If you have ever thought given your love of books you might one day start or one day might have started a bookshop, you might find this book of interest. Or maybe it's not the book for you. In any case, location is, of course, paramount. I liked the sea nearby, the beach, the characters and how they say what they don't mean, or withhold at any rate what they're really thinking. The small town economics, politics, social classes, education. The old building in disrepair and haunted. The outsider from outside, and the outsider from within. There's a movie, which did not hold entirely to the book, but it's a good movie, and does the book no harm. ( )

An extremely pleasant surprise, this is a beautifully composed and penetrating short novel. Given it's immediacy and cinematic quality, I assumed it had been filmed at some point. It hasn't, so I wish someone would.

Bleak. But was interesting in that the setup was in the vein of cloyingly plucky quaint English tale, but instead ended up a bleak tale of a woman beaten by the forces-that-be in small-town-mindedness.

"Culture is for amateurs."

It is now de rigueur to declare Fitzgerald as one of the great neglected English novelists of the 20th century, and I must add my voice to that woeful chorus. Her starkly funny - or perhaps humorous upsetting - style is akin to those great ladies Muriel Spark and Barbara Pym. Her characters, like theirs, often hover on the fringes of good society; the "distressed gentlewomen", Pym often calls them.

Florence Green is one such character, a plain but still reasonably young widow who chooses to open a bookshop in a town that wants to reject her at every turn - even her resident poltergeist wants nothing to do with her. In 10 short chapters, Fitzgerald outlines Florence's unsettling encounters with the townfolk in wry, pointed notes, never allowing us to become either sympathetic or deeply enmeshed in the lives of any of them. Its events are of no consequence, and yet somehow feel staggeringly consequential. And at the heart of it all are questions about how we appreciate culture, how we relate to books themselves, and why we allow our dreams to take hold of us against all reason.

A deeply enjoyable read for fans of ironic British novelists. ( )